If anyone is confined to his room, even as Johnson was when Malone found him roasting apples and reading a history of Birmingham, he cannot do better than surround himself with the publications of the Historical Manuscripts Commission; they will cost him next to nothing, tell him something new on every page, revive a host of old memories and scores of half-forgotten names, and perhaps tempt him to become a confirmed reader.

FIRST EDITIONS

This is an age of great publicity.  Not only are our streets well lighted, but also our lives.  The cosy nooks and corners, crannies, and dark places where, in old-fashioned days, men hugged their private vices without shamefacedness have been swept away as ruthlessly as Seven Dials.  All the questionable pursuits, fancies, foibles of silly, childish man are discussed grimly and at length in the newspapers and magazines.  Our poor hobby-horses are dragged out of the stable, and made to show their shambling paces before the mob of gentlemen who read with ease.  There has been much prate lately of as innocent a foible as ever served to make men self-forgetful for a few seconds of time—­the collecting of first editions.  Somebody hard up for ‘copy’ denounced this pastime, and made merry over a virtuoso’s whim.  Somebody else—­Mr. Slater, I think it was—­thought fit to put in a defence, and thereupon a dispute arose as to why men bought first editions dear when they could buy last editions cheap.  Brutal, domineering fellows bellowed their complete indifference to Shakespeare’s Quartos till timid dilettanti turned pale and fled.

The fact, of course, is that in such a dispute as this there is but one thing to do—­namely, to persuade the Attorney-General of the day to enter up a nolle prosequi, and for him who collects first editions to go on collecting.  There is nothing to be serious about in the matter.  It is not literature.  Some of the greatest lovers of letters who have ever lived—­Dr. Johnson, for example, and Thomas de Quincey and Carlyle—­have cared no more for first editions than I do for Brussels sprouts.  You may love Moliere with a love surpassing your love of woman without any desire to beggar yourself in Paris by purchasing early copies of the plays.  You may be perfectly content to read Walton’s Lives in an edition of 1905, if there is one; and as for Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver and the Vicar of Wakefield—­are they not eternal favourites, and just as tickling to the fancy in their nineteenth-century dress as in their eighteenth?  The whole thing is but a hobby—­but a paragraph in one chapter of the vast, but most agreeable, history of human folly.  If John Doe is blankly indifferent to Richard Roe’s Elizabethan dramatists, it is only fair to remember how sublime is Richard’s contempt for John’s collection of old musical instruments.  If these gentlemen are wise they will discuss, when they meet, the weather, or the